Top 85 Frank O'Hara Quotes
#1. Life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.
Frank O'Hara
#2. Dear:
I am dying
without you, and I won't be dying long. But don't come.
Best always,
Frank
Frank O'Hara
#3. If you don't appear
at all one day they think you're lazy
or dead.
Frank O'Hara
#4. ... and I'll be happy here and happy there, full
of tea and tears
Frank O'Hara
#5. I don't ... like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'
Frank O'Hara
#6. It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.
Frank O'Hara
#7. Down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess.
Frank O'Hara
#8. There were occasionally
rifts in the cloud where the face
of a woman appeared, frowning.
Frank O'Hara
#9. And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for bullfight and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they'll soon tear down.
Frank O'Hara
#10. Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible
Frank O'Hara
#11. O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors
Frank O'Hara
#12. To be cool,
decisive,
precise,
yes,
while the barn door hits you in the face
Frank O'Hara
#13. I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up
Frank O'Hara
#14. My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.
Frank O'Hara
#15. Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
Frank O'Hara
#16. When I am feeling
depressed and anxious
sullen
all you have to do is
take off your clothes
and all is wiped away
revealing life's
tenderness.
Frank O'Hara
#17. ... and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy
we shall be happy
but we shall continue to be ourselves everything
continues to be possible
Frank O'Hara
#18. I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days!
Frank O'Hara
#19. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.
Frank O'Hara
#20. I am moved by the multitudes of your intelligence and sometimes, returning, I become the sea - in love with your speed, your heaviness and breath.
Frank O'Hara
#21. A man was the cause of it.
An unarmed man with a weapon.
Frank O'Hara
#22. I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Frank O'Hara
#23. I miss you always
when I go to the beach
the sand is wet with
tears that seem mine
although I never weep
and hold you in my
heart with a very real
humor you'd be proud of
Frank O'Hara
#25. I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It's more important to confirm the least sincere. The clouds get enough attention as it is ...
Frank O'Hara
#26. Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!
Frank O'Hara
#27. Oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much
Frank O'Hara
#28. I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to.
Frank O'Hara
#29. I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.
Frank O'Hara
#30. But it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it ...
Frank O'Hara
#31. I don't think I want to win anything I think I want to die unadorned.
Frank O'Hara
#32. I can't even find a pond small enough
to drown in without being ostentatious
Frank O'Hara
#34. My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.
Frank O'Hara
#36. Willow trees, willow trees they remind me of Desdemona
I'm so damned literary
and at the same time the waters rushing past remind
me of nothing
Frank O'Hara
#37. I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Negres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
Frank O'Hara
#38. There's too much lime in the world and not enough gin
Frank O'Hara
#39. But to be part of the treetops and the blueness, invisible
the iridescent darknesses beyond,
silent, listening to
the air becoming no air becoming air again
Frank O'Hara
#40. You know we've all sinned a lot against science
so we really ought to be as available as an apple
on a bough
pleasant thought fresh air free love cross-pollenization
oh oh god how I'd love to dream let alone sleep
Frank O'Hara
#41. The waves wash in, warm and salty,
leaving your eyebrows white and
the edge of your cheekbone. Your ear
aches. You are lonely. On the
underside of a satin leaf, hot
with shade, a scorpion sleeps. And
one Sunday I will be shot brushing
my teeth. I am a native of this island.
Frank O'Hara
#42. The stars fell one by one into his eyes and burnt.
Frank O'Hara
#43. I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab
which is typical
and not just of modern life
Frank O'Hara
#44. See how free we are! as a nation of persons.
Frank O'Hara
#45. And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space.
Frank O'Hara
#46. It may be the coldest day of The year, what does he think of That? I mean, what do I? And if I do, Perhaps I am myself again.
Frank O'Hara
#47. all I want is a room up there
and you in it
Frank O'Hara
#48. The stars blink like a hairnet that was dropped / on a seat and now it is lying in the alley behind / the theatre where my play is echoed by dying voices.
Frank O'Hara
#49. The only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your
mouth
and dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are
Frank O'Hara
#50. I'm becoming
the street.
Who are you in love with?
me?
Straight against the light I cross.
Frank O'Hara
#51. The beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian
heroes, lies in
lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions
Frank O'Hara
#52. I embraced a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.
Frank O'Hara
#53. I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile.
Frank O'Hara
#54. I wonder if the course of narcissism through the ages would have been any different had Narcissus first peered into a cesspool. He probably did.
Frank O'Hara
#55. My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.
Frank O'Hara
#56. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart.
Frank O'Hara
#57. And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural.
Frank O'Hara
#58. Oh mothers you will have made the little tykes
so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies
they won't know the difference
and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy
Frank O'Hara
#59. In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.
Frank O'Hara
#60. That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.
Frank O'Hara
#62. Leaf! you are so big!
How can you change your
color, then just fall!
As if there were no
such thing as integrity!
Frank O'Hara
#63. The only thing to do is simply continue
is that simple
yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do
can you do it
yes, you can because it is the only thing to do
Frank O'Hara
#64. I'm so damned literary
and at the same time the waters rushing past remind
me of nothing
I'm so damn empty
Frank O'Hara
#65. I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.
Frank O'Hara
#66. And I have mastered the speed and strength which is the
armor of the world.
Frank O'Hara
#67. I seem to be defying fate, or am I avoiding it?
Frank O'Hara
#68. When you are the only
passenger if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go
Frank O'Hara
#69. The moon passes into clouds
so hurt by the street lights
of your glance oh my heart
Frank O'Hara
#70. When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leaf
to turn away from the sun
it loves it there.
There's nothing so spiritual about being happy
but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.
Frank O'Hara
#71. There is a geography which holds its hands just so far from the breast and pushes you away, crying so.
Frank O'Hara
#72. Stars are out and there is sea
enough beneath the glistening earth
to bear me toward the future
which is not so dark. I see.
Frank O'Hara
#73. They were too young then to know what they would ultimately need from a barren and heart-sore life ...
Frank O'Hara
#74. Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under
them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.
Frank O'Hara
#75. I love you. I love you,
but I'm turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.
Frank O'Hara
#76. ... my words are love
which willfully parades in
its room, refusing to move.
Frank O'Hara
#77. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.
Frank O'Hara
#78. One never need leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes - I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.
Frank O'Hara
#79. When
I think of all the things I've been thinking of
I feel insane
Frank O'Hara
#80. It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.
I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.
Frank O'Hara
#81. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.
Frank O'Hara
#82. Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.
O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac
Frank O'Hara
#83. I call
to the spirits of other lands to make fecund my existence
Frank O'Hara
#84. Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more
adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?
Frank O'Hara
#85. It is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
Frank O'Hara
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